Studies of medieval religious life have paid surprisingly little
attention to the charitable revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. This may be due to the fact that scholars have tended to
cast the motives underlying medieval charity in social and economic
terms rather than religious. James William Brodman's broad survey of
medieval religious charity focuses on religious institutions that had
charity as a central objective. He argues that a caritative movement
that was distinctly religious in nature swept through Europe during
the high and later Middle Ages.

Brodman has devoted much of his career to studying the practice of
charity in medieval Spain, and his most recent book is broader in
scope, surveying religious charity in medieval Europe writ large. In
the first chapter he examines the medieval ideology of charity, which
he believes inspired women and men to assist the sick and needy. While
medieval ideas about charity drew on scriptural and patristic
foundations, Brodman suggests that twelfth and thirteenth-century
theologians, canonists, preachers, and hagiographers popularized the
notion that the practice of charity was the highest form of religious
life. It is certainly possible that some people made charitable
bequests because they were inspired by the example of a local
charitable saint or because of a sermon that they heard. But was
ideology necessarily the impetus for charitable practice, as Brodman
assumes? Might not giving practices have played a role in shaping a
compassionate religious and social ethos rather than the other way
around? And what social and religious forces led to the popularization
of a charitable ideology in the first place? Along these lines, it
might have been fruitful to consider contemporaneous developments in
Christian spirituality, including the rise of affective piety and
devotion to Christ's humanity, which Sarah McNamer has linked with
"the invention of compassion." [1]

Subsequent chapters examine how the ideology of charity was given
institutional expression, whether in the form of hospitals or
leprosaria, or in groups devoted to charity, such as the hospitaller
and military orders (the Hospitallers of Saint John, Teutonic Order,
Trinitarians, Mercedarians, Order of the Holy Spirit, and Antonines,
to name some of the most significant), lay confraternities, and
penitential groups such as the beguines and Humiliati. The recipients
of charitable organizations included a wide range of vulnerable
people: the poor, sick, pilgrims, orphans, widows, captives, and
prostitutes. Although some charitable associations adopted a monastic-
like organizational structure, Brodman shows that they were
decentralized and varied in form. Moreover, the medieval charitable
movement "formed a vast jumble of institutions of varied size,
resources, personnel, and governance" (283).

One of the principal reasons for this lack of cohesiveness, according
to Brodman, was the church's inability to integrate the charitable
movement into the traditional ecclesiastical structure. There were
attempts by some regional church councils, for instance, to impose
religious discipline on hospitals, requiring those who served in
hospitals to observe the Augustinian Rule, or having the local bishop
conduct regular inspections of his diocese's hospitals. According to
Brodman, however, larger ecumenical councils like the Fourth Lateran
Council did not seek to regularize Europe's hospitals (and other
charitable institutions) because they were "between two worlds," the
religious and the secular, and thus had a mixed identity. Brodman
argues that the church's failure to integrate charitable institutions
into the ecclesiastical structure was largely due to the fact that the
charitable movement "straddled the clerical-laic divide. Its very
nature defied efforts to organize it hierarchically or to impose the
religious life upon all of its practitioners" (284). Moreover, much of
the initiative for the charitable movement came from members of the
religiously inspired laity, the lay women and men who gave alms and
made bequests to charitable causes, and in some cases became lay
sisters and brothers in their local hospital. Many of the women and
men canonized during this period were made saints because of their
charitable work, including founding a hospital or working in one. And
among these charitable saints, a significant number were laypeople.

While in some ways this book is quite ambitious in scope, Brodman
defines religion and charity somewhat narrowly. Despite including a
discussion of a wide variety of charitable organizations (from bridge
brotherhoods to lay confraternities), the author's orientation is very
much the central institutional church. He almost sounds a note of
disappointment by the lack of general conciliar legislation dealing
with charity, as if he is dissatisfied with charitable organizations
that can be regarded as merely local, autonomous, or semi-religious.
He is too quick to dismiss the role of the friars in the charitable
movement, making the questionable claim that "in the main, charity was
never more than a peripheral concern of the mendicant friars" (270).
Elsewhere, while acknowledging that some friars argued that almsgiving
was one of the best remedies for sin, he contends that mendicant
preachers' praise of the potentially salvific suffering of involuntary
poverty might have served to discourage charitable giving. It is more
likely, however, that such sermons lent new prestige to the poor and
convinced listeners of the spiritual benefits of providing assistance
to them. There also remains a need to study the impact that these
kinds of sermons may have had on non-institutional forms of charity.
Informal almsgiving and familial and neighborly support systems, while
more difficult to trace, were vital, as Sharon Farmer has shown, for
the survival of many of medieval Europe's most needy people. [2] What
role did religious ideology and motivations play in these non-
institutional forms of charity? And were institutional and non-
institutional forms of charity really all that distinct?

Despite some shortcomings, this book calls attention to an essential
and often overlooked aspect of medieval religious movements. One of
the book's strengths is that it highlights the strong religious
dimensions of the caritative movement while also stressing that the
impetus for the movement came largely from lay men and women. The
author wisely rejects the cynical claims of some historians that
medieval charity was merely ceremonial, or never more than a self-
serving, calculated display of the giver's power and status. As
Brodman shows, the high Middle Ages represented a turning point in the
way that women and men thought about and acted toward their poor and
needy neighbors.